About Paul

Me, myself, I:

Englishman living in Canada
I grew up in Bedfordshire (about 40 miles north of London), went to university in the north-west of England, then moved south again for work – see my résumé / CV for more details.
Kerri and I met in 1999; I moved to Toronto (where she was already living) in 2001 and we got married a year later.

Agile coach
I strongly believe Agile is the right mindset for projects, especially software development – it’s about building a close relationship with your customer and giving them frequent incremental updates (of actual running software) until you deliver what they want, as opposed to the “keep the customer in the dark then surprise them and fix everything as a Change Request” approach of more traditional Waterfall projects.
You can find my résumé / CV at topmanager.ca.

Photographer

History: I started taking photos as a teenager and progressed to a film SLR, but it was once I moved to Canada and bought my first digital camera that I really became inspired. Partly because of my new location and partly because it was now easier to experiment I began exploring the city with my camera, and in 2009 I started Toronto Photo Walks as a way to share the fun.

Motorsport: As a huge fan of motor racing it was amazing to be asked to be one of the photographers at the 2010 Honda Indy Toronto. I was invited back to shoot HIT 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, and again in 2016. We are given a very specific shotlist as we shoot for the race organisers and they want lots of images of people having fun at the events which they can use on the HIT website, not just the cars going by at speed.

Badminton player
I play at a badminton club in Toronto’s Greenwood and Danforth area. I’m also the club’s “webmaster” (to use a “Web 1.0” title!); the site is at BADinTO.ca

F1 fan
I’m a huge fan of motor racing, especially Formula One (I’ve driven Silverstone’s Formula One circuit, home of the British Grand Prix!) and British Touring Cars, although I’ve not seen much of the BTCC since I emigrated. I’ve not been to the Montreal GP yet, but I do get media access to shoot the Indy race weekend in Toronto – see my section on photography.

Geek
I started playing with computers back in the 1970s; I’ve used CP/M, DR-DOS, MS-DOS and virtually all flavours of Windows, but my preference has always been for UNIX and, more recently, Linux and OS X. There are more gorygeeky details for those who are brave enough.

What else….?
As per the stereotypical geek image (of my age) I’m in to “classic” rock and have seen quite a few bands live. Rather than try to explain my taste in music, take a look at my music page for bands I’ve seen and what I’ve been listening to recently.